At a DNC fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, President Obama said: There’s a reason why we haven’t had a woman president; that we as a society still grapple with what it means to see powerful women. And it still troubles us in a lot of ways, unfairly, and that expresses itself in all sorts of ways. […]

Eric Boehlert highlights an incredible statement from presidential debate moderator Chris Wallace, offered during an interview with his Fox colleague Sandra Smith: While Hillary Clinton has long been more transparent than Donald Trump, he conceded, Trump is now winning the transparency debate on health. How could he justify this contention? Because, as Boehlert explains: Wallace […]

Donald Trump has repeatedly said he won’t release his taxes because he’s under audit. But that dubious rationale has been disputed by Warren Buffett, among many others. A week ago, Trump gave himself away by saying he would release his tax returns immediately if Hillary Clinton produced her deleted personal emails. "Let her release emails. I'll release my […]

Trump did an interview with Russia Today where he continued his perturbing habit of being more favorably inclined toward Vladimir Putin than to his own country. Chuck Todd reacted with a level of indignation typically reserved for Clinton, exclaiming, “Donald Trump went on Russian propaganda television to trash the American press corps!” Watch the clip:

Racism and White Nationalism In August, Hillary Clinton delivered a pivotal speech detailing Trump’s centering of white nationalism in his campaign and his mainstreaming of their ugly constellation of bigotries, which culminated with his hiring of Steven Bannon as his campaign’s chief executive. (He followed up by hiring sleaze-merchant and president of Citizens United David Bossie a few […]

Trump's use of foundation as piggy bank might be biggest scandal of '16, and @Fahrenthold will be on Pulitzer list https://t.co/RtyuHnMCNT — Glenn Thrush (@GlennThrush) September 20, 2016 The latest reporting from @Fahrenthold appears to show Trump viewed his foundation as his personal slush fund: https://t.co/wnsEtpOZ4V — Emo Desperado (@JoyAnnReid) September 20, 2016 As my […]

The reaction to Fallon’s softball Trump interview was swift: https://twitter.com/MariaErnandez3b/status/776722856927432704 https://twitter.com/JeffreyGoldberg/status/776768620139388928 https://twitter.com/aminatou/status/776647702432124929 https://twitter.com/Ateeya/status/776633870598959104 https://twitter.com/KAmorphous/status/776732092285812737 "Wow, Donald Trump went on Jimmy Fallon, acted cute, & let Jimmy mess up his hair! I guess that erases the years of Trump's hate speech!" — Eric Wolfson (@EricWolfson) September 16, 2016 Jimmy Fallon: Don't put Trump on TV & […]

Watch as a reporter begins to ask about Ryan’s criticisms of Trump, and Ryan interrupts with a joke, prompting a huge round of uproarious laughter: When everyone finally settles down, Pence finally gives a punt of an answer about how much he and his running mate respect Ryan and how there are always differences in […]

I’ve been covering the grossly imbalanced coverage of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump for the duration of the 2016 campaign. The double standard against Clinton has reached new lows and the frenzy to take her down is at a fever pitch. I tried to capture it all in a recent piece titled R.I.P. Political Journalism (1440-2016). In July […]

This is astonishing by any standards. Mike Pence defends Donald Trump's praise of Vladimir Putin: 'Inarguable' that Putin is a stronger leader than Obama https://t.co/dmjkTvpaMA — Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) September 9, 2016 Trump’s ghostwriter: Trump reveres Putin. He wants Putin's power. He wants to be a dictator. Every American — every American — should […]

Politico recently ran an experiment in which they fact checked every statement by either campaign for a five-day period. The results were staggering: According to POLITICO’s five-day analysis Trump averaged about one falsehood every three minutes and 15 seconds over nearly five hours of remarks. In raw numbers, that’s 87 erroneous statements in five days. The message […]

With a few tweets and demeaning nicknames, Donald Trump handily dispatched some of the most powerful and well-funded Republicans in the country. So why is he struggling against Hillary Clinton in the general election despite a monumental and well-documented effort by the national media to tilt the playing field in his favor? Prof. Thomas Patterson examined […]

Humans have an uncanny ability to deny the obvious, even when the obvious is an existential threat. In the case of the 2016 election, we are looking at the potential end of the American experiment. That is a sentiment expressed by a range of scholars and public figures across the political spectrum. On May 18, […]

Garrison Keillor waxes eloquent about Hillary Clinton’s quest to break a 227-year barrier: Some day historians will get this right and look back at the steady pitter-pat of scandals that turned out to be nothing, nada, zero and ixnay and will conclude that, almost a century after women’s suffrage, almost 50 years after Richard Nixon signed […]

Republicans see Dr. Joe Heck, an Iraq War veteran and brigadier general in the National Guard, as their best bet to pick up Harry Reid’s open seat. However, former State Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, who could become the first Latina to serve in the Senate, is keeping the race close. Questions are now being […]

President Obama made a powerful case for Hillary Clinton, tearing into the double standard she faces: I sure do get frustrated with the way this campaign is covered. I’m just telling the truth. Guys in the back [reporters], I’m just telling you the truth about how I feel about this. Do you mind if I just vent for a second? […]

On Friday, Tim Kaine blasted Mike Pence for parroting Donald Trump’s offensive claim that Russian president Vladimir Putin has been a better leader than President Obama. https://youtu.be/q5uwcrbuEKs?t=6m30s Kaine: What about invading other countries is leadership? What about running your economy into the ground is leadership? What about persecuting LGBT Russians is leadership? What about setting […]

My colleague Matthew Chapman writes about Gary Johnson’s highly questionable environmental policies: As we have noted before, there is a great deal to dislike about Johnson. He wants to eliminate the federal income tax. He keeps flip-flopping on Citizens United. He wants to abolish mandatory vaccination. He has very weird ideas about public accommodation laws. His […]

Here is a sample of what it would be like if Hillary Clinton switched places with Donald Trump: #JustImagineHillary saying our military is the gang that couldn't shoot straight. — Peter Daou (@peterdaou) September 20, 2016 #JustImagineHillary saying a woman's pregnancy is "an inconvenience for a business." — Mindy Mendelsohn (@MindyMendelsoh1) September 20, 2016 https://twitter.com/VonHammersmark7/status/778052295430987776 https://twitter.com/anne_seely/status/778056005854728192 […]

Speaking to Sean Hannity in 2015, Donald Trump said this: The problem we have right now—we have a society that sits back and says we don’t have to do anything. Eventually, the 50 percent cannot carry—and it’s unfair to them—but cannot carry the other 50 percent. Trump echoed the same sentiment in an interview with MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt: […]

An important nugget in the new ABC/Washington Post poll: President Obama’s approval rating now stands at a whopping 58 percent, the highest rating since his first year in office. Let’s put that in perspective. Obama’s approval rating as of September 2016 is almost double the approval rating of George W. Bush in September 2008, which […]

THE CLINTON RULES In July of 2015, reporter Jonathan Allen famously defined the Clinton Rules: “The Clinton rules are driven by reporters’ and editors’ desire to score the ultimate prize in contemporary journalism: the scoop that brings down Hillary Clinton and her family’s political empire.” Independent studies have reinforced Allen’s observation, concluding Clinton has received the most negative coverage […]

After a bitter legislative battle, Obamacare passed by a hair. I followed the news closely. I knew it was was a landmark day for millions without coverage.  Then Obamacare became personal to me because along with millions of others, I lost a good job during the Great Recession. I managed to pay my very expensive […]

Four decades ago, “the Justice Department filed a civil rights case that accused the Trump firm, whose complexes contained 14,000 apartments, of violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968.” And that racialized hostility has continued, finding a home on Trump’s Twitter feed. Sadly, because president Obama has done such a poor job as president, you won't […]

John McCain has some Trump Trouble. Trump is not the sort of candidate a war hero like McCain wants to support, given Trump’s willingness to refer to the U.S. military as “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight” and attack a Gold Star family. Trump even attacked McCain himself, saying, in reference to McCain having been a […]

Hillary Clinton has weathered one of the toughest periods of her campaign and Team Trump can’t be happy about his 7-point deficit in the new NBC/WSJ poll: In two-way race, Clinton leads Trump by 7pts among both likely and reg voters, per new natl NBC/WSJ poll pic.twitter.com/8fcl32a75e — Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) September 21, 2016 Notably, Trump’s unpopularity is more than […]

Over the last few days, four more names have trended; four more Black citizens who have been killed by police violence or neglect. We name them, individually, because they are not mere statistics in a grim tally of police killings, lumped together to be demonized and discarded. Keith Lamont Scott, 43, was fatally shot in […]

Although most young people oppose Donald Trump, a surprising number of them are also considering turning their backs on the major parties altogether and backing the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson. As we have noted before, there is a great deal to dislike about Johnson. He wants to eliminate the federal income tax. He keeps flip-flopping on Citizens […]

Last week, the Senate voted 95-3 to approve funding for Flint’s water crisis, allocating $270 million to aid residents. That total includes $20 million to develop a national lead exposure registry. There is a catch. Supporters in the House will have to attach the allocation to some kind of must-pass spending bill to get it to President […]

On a day when Donald Trump has again invoked the assassination of Hillary Clinton, this response, from Kierna Mayo, is stunning in its simplicity and power: Time is winding down and most of the 2016 race is in the rear view mirror. The view is ugly. https://twitter.com/Shakestweetz/status/776930224730673152 Hillary Clinton’s emails have been covered by major media […]